


the trouble with explaining with words

by reena_jenkins



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Luke and Leia Switched, Bounty Hunter Leia Organa, Competency, F/M, Force-Sensitive Leia Organa, Legends Canon, Legends characters cameos, Mentor/Protégé, Mission Fic, POV Leia Organa, gratuitous mention of Batuuan foodstuffs I have eaten, mutually requited, timelines? What timelines?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-07
Updated: 2019-12-07
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:21:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21616774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reena_jenkins/pseuds/reena_jenkins
Summary: the "Leia is raised on Tatooine and becomes a Bounty Hunter" AU that literally one person asked for.
Relationships: Boba Fett/Leia Organa
Comments: 28
Kudos: 215
Collections: Star Wars Rare Pairs Exchange 2019





	the trouble with explaining with words

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FettsOnTop (GTFF)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GTFF/gifts).



> Title comes from the quote:
> 
> “That was the trouble with explaining with words. If you explained with gunpowder, people listened.”  
> ― Dean F. Wilson, Dustrunner
> 
> 500000 thanks to gondolin for cheerleading my seventy-billion different AU ideas, and also for the reassurance that my writing attempts did not Fully Suck once I narrowed my focus.
> 
> 50000000 more thanks to wandrianwind for the supremely last-minute storytelling guidance, as I kinda dub-conned my way into her DMs for impromptu beta-ing. 
> 
> Any remaining weirdness is fully my fault, because I cannot leave well enough alone, and was poking at this text until approximately one (1) hour before reveals.

They’ve been partners for several years, now, and they’ve found a rhythm that works well. She’s the young slip of a thing that the target overlooks, or tries to pick up, or simply doesn’t see as a threat. He’s the knife to the lower thorax, the blaster between shoulder blades, a tangible threat without ever firing a shot. She’s the Bestine sea anemone to his armored clawfish; at first glance the clawfish is the more obviously dangerous of the two, but it’s the anemone that’s all the more deadly, and it shows in their success rate.

* * *

Despite the length of their partnership, Leia's time with Fett has not always been harmonious. Leia was fourteen years old and riding high on her own self-righteousness the day they met - not to say that she doesn't have a core powered by anger now, but even Leia will admit that insulting Jabba the Hutt's favorite bounty hunter in front of the entire palace was a poor decision. She’d come along with Uncle Owen to beg for a loan for the moisture farm, one more dry summer putting them all at risk, and the decision to borrow money from the Hutts rather than death by dehydration or raiders had been a hard one. Leia was more angered pride than sense at that point, and Fett had just stepped on her foot where she waited for Uncle Owen to speak with the majordomo.

"Kriffing washed-up peedunky who couldn't find his own jetpack with two hands and a metal detector, let alone a bounty," were her exact words, muttered into the silence between songs while Leia waited. Of course, she didn’t exactly mutter quietly, so not only did Fett hear her, Jabba did as well.

"The great and illustrious Jabba says that if the small one is so sure of her place, perhaps she can find Beebox before you, Fett. Whoever brings him in first will find great praise from his most excellent Jabba, and an extra 200 wupiupi in reward. But if the small one cannot live up to her big words, the mighty Jabba's rancor is always hungry."

Uncle Owen’s face as the majordomo translated should have been saved to the holoprojector; part irritation, part pride, part terror. But 200 wupiupi would go a very long way towards solvency for the homestead, and Leia had never backed down from a challenge in her life – not when Biggs dared her to spend all night outside in the dunes when she was nine, and certainly not when that jumped-up kreetle larva holding her family hostage dared her to do better than some banged-up helmethead that couldn’t even shine his own armor. Leia could do this, easy. All she’d need to do was find out which hangar bay the sleemo was based out of, camp out behind his ship, and nab him in his sleep the night before he tried to leave planet.

Which was how Leia Skywalker got her first job as an non-Guild bounty hunter, tweaked the nose of the man who’d go on to become her long term partner, and got the chewing-out of a lifetime from Uncle Owen for the entire trip home across the Dune Sea.

But she also got those 200 wupiupi in the end, so even Aunt Beru couldn’t object too strenuously the next time Leia took a retrieval job from Jabba the Hutt.

* * *

Their current mark falls like all the others:

Leia sits alone at the bar, with an empty seat on either side, and looks without looking around the space. At this time of day, only a few jawas and an overtired human freighter pilot occupy tables in the cantina. There are plenty of open seats available, and Leia can make good sightlines to all of the room's possible entrances and exits. She doesn’t see Fett, but then again, she shouldn’t. He knows where he needs to be, and she trusts him.

The mark, an Aqualish listed on his bounty puck as Sawkee, comes striding through the offset door to the cantina as if he owns the place. He disregards the several empty seats at the bar and comes right up next to Leia, takes advantage of her body language. Leia’s gotten good, over the years, at the deliberate hunched shoulder, the slightly furtive movements, the aura of _I’m a prey animal, come antagonize me_ that draws scum like this out of the woodwork. They can’t resist the urge to punch down on someone who looks weaker than they are. It’s a flaw Leia manages to exploit over and over, to great financial gain.

Sawkee takes his cue from Leia, cues that he thinks are genuine through the dim light. He lays his furred hand on her arm, stopping her glass halfway to her mouth. He rumbles something in Aqualish that Leia can’t understand – she knows how to swear on ten different mothers’ graves in Huttese, and can coax all manner of favors out of droids in binary, and she even knows a smattering of Mando’a from when Fett gets tired and forgets his Basic, but Leia’s never had an interest in trying to speak a language that requires additional mandibular parts to convey properly. It sounds like nerfs bleating to her, honestly, but all the same, it’s easy enough to tell by his body language that Sawkee is trying to get in her space, and possibly her pants. Anyway, that’s what a decently-ranged transceiver and a protocol droid fluent in over six million forms of communication are for – she’ll ask the questions now, Sawkee will rumble out an answer, and then she and Fett will decode it all later once he’s unconscious in the cargo hold of Slave I. 

* * *

The first time Leia and Fett worked together as a partnership, it was at the _request_ of Jabba the Hutt. Leia didn’t know what hold he had over Fett, but the homestead was still paying off interest on their loan, and neither she nor her aunt and uncle were in a position to refuse. Some smuggler by the name of Terrik had tried to renege on a deal with the Hutt Syndicate, and because seeing a tiny girl show up the big, strong Mandalorian had amused Jabba so very much last time, Leia and Fett were to work together for her capture.

“The glorious and magnificent Jabba has decreed that despite his lack of decorum and general dishevelment, the bounty hunter Fett has much knowledge to share. Perhaps even enough that the little one can learn.”

Leia had been ready to tear the majordomo a new orifice with that pronouncement – she was fairly certain he embellished that backhanded compliment to Fett, too, even though her Huttese vocabulary was mostly in expletives. And yet, there Fett stood fully at attention, no change in his posture to indicate that he’d just been insulted twice over – once for the insult itself, and once for running the insult through translation for added indignity. He’d probably reacted behind the helmet, though. No-one wore a mask like that all the time just for the cranial safety benefits – maybe it was so he could roll his eyes and grimace, and clients would be none the wiser.

By the time they’d made their way from Jabba’s palace to the Mos Espa tapcafé where Terrik was last seen, the air between Leia and Fett was charged and uncomfortable. He hadn’t spoken a word when she’d tried to apologize earlier for getting them both into their current situation, and the speeder ride into town had been less than amiable. Fett had parked directly in front of the café’s open awning, and Leia followed from the speeder into the shade, more than looking forward to a chilled caf and a seat that didn’t jounce over every rock and pebble in the Dune Sea.

“Look. I don’t want to be fed to the rancor any more than you do, nerfbrain, so let’s just get this over with and be done. “

“You know, you’ve got a big mouth for such a short kid.”

“ _Aurek_ , I am not a kid, I am fifteen standard and old enough to enlist in the Imperial Academy if I wanted to. Which I don’t, because they’re just as bad as the Hutts and even less useful, but it still counts. _Besh_ , I am tall enough to kick you in the codpiece if you don’t knock it off with cracks about my height. _Cresh_ , everyone knows the age of majority on Mandalore is thirteen, so don’t even try with me. And _Dorn_ , there goes the mark. She’s getting away, and she just stole your landspeeder. Great job, really good job catching the bounty on this one. I am learning so very much here, under your guidance.”

“If you’d stop running your mouth just to hear yourself speak, you’d notice I left the key in the ignition on purpose. There’s a tracker in the speeder. All we have to do is follow it back to wherever she’s going, and not only do we have our bounty, we can recover the stolen merch. Double paycheck, half the effort.”

“…..oh.”

“Yeah, oh. I do know what I’m about, kid. I’ve been doing this since I was younger than you.”

“Well, then. Alright. Guess I should go rent us an eopie to follow the tracker.”

“…’course, even back then, I was still taller than you are now.”

* * *

The fact that Leia effectively can’t understand her target actually makes the job a bit easier – rather than needing to hide her visceral dislike for every one of his likely lewd-bordering-violent remarks, she just mentally inserts a flirtatious comment from Fett instead and responds to that. Of course, in actuality Fett flirts like a feral tooka – he brings home bound bounties to lay her feet, and then scurries off before she can get close enough to touch. Fictitious Fett is much more transparent in his appreciation of her charms.

He’s always been like that, though - even from the first time Fett took off his helmet in her presence to reveal a face that shook Leia down to her bones, a gut reaction of _I know you_ even without ever having made eye contact with the man before. It was the same jarring moment she felt when meeting Biggs for the first time, and he’s been her best friend for over a decade. Leia learned young to pay attention when her intuition screamed, and Boba Fett has been a resonance through her the same way a krayt dragon’s roar rolled across the salt flats. 

* * *

It had taken more time than Leia expected, to move on from the _antagonistic mentor-reluctant mentee_ relationship of her first partnered bounty with Fett. Leia Skywalker was many things - a decent grease monkeylizard, a reluctant moisture farmer, a crack shot with anything that fired a blaster charge – but a being that could not only recognize when she was in the wrong, but also unbend enough to make amends, was not one of them. She’d had plenty of practice in her sixteen years of life, when it came to the droid mechanics (she learned through fixing the parts that couldn’t be replaced), or the moisture farming (she grew up on a moisture farm through no choice of her own), or the shooting (long-range weapons do a world of good in keeping the sand people off the homestead), but the practical application of stepping down from one’s pride was not Leia’s strong suit. _A force of will to bend kyber around_ , her Aunt Beru would say whenever Leia came in from playing with Biggs only to swear fervently that she’d never speak to that no-good bantha-butt ever again, and then Aunt Beru would shake her head in that way that let Leia know she was thinking about Leia’s missing Father again.

Biggs let her get away with it, though – he’d go back to how things were once her temper cooled down and Leia came back out to play, and say nothing for it. Fett, however, was not Biggs. And the worst part was, she wanted him to respect her now, even more than she wanted Biggs to play Clone Troopers versus Jedi with her when she was six.

So Leia had come to the slowly dawning and terrible realization that she’d have to make a better apology than the stilted and half-meant thing in Fett’s speeder last winter that she never acknowledged again, or at least find some other way to express her regret at not taking him seriously. 

Fett’s agreement had been a surprise, when Leia had asked if he’d continue to teach her what he knew after they’d apprehended Mirax Terrik together. Maybe it was because Leia had found the extra stash of credits that Terrik had buried outside the hangar bay, by closing her eyes and refusing to move from the spot when he was ready to leave with Jabba’s prize, that made Fett agree. Maybe it was because he saw something in her that reminded Fett of his younger self; the way Leia was driven to keep her Aunt and Uncle safe, or the ragged joy she found in chasing a runner to ground. Maybe he’d gotten paid and then gotten laid, to put him in an agreeable mood. Whatever it was, Fett’s guidance and the official paperwork filed with the Bounty Hunters' Guild meant that Leia did not have to pay Guild dues for an approved Apprenticeship, and instead all her payouts could go back into the homestead.

Watching Fett work, as he brought her along on job after job and showed her all the little things she’d overlooked that first time, was glorious. It was hard, and it made her think about the world from strange directions, and when she got things wrong Fett would simply stare at her with the blank face of his helmet and somehow she’d still be able to _feel_ his disappointment, but it was also somehow the most engaging thing Leia had ever experienced. He could break down a location into likely places a mark would hide, or the ten most unexpected offensive weapons from ordinary objects, or even how to use others’ misperceptions to get information on a mark. He introduced her to more foods and people and places and strange ideas than a girl from just outside the Jundland Wastes would ever have hoped to encounter, just two years ago. It felt like seeing the mushrooms bloom under the vaporators, in the first few moments after dusk – an unexpected glory in an otherwise-dreary environment. Leia had seen, and tasted, and she wanted more. She wanted to be as good as Fett, even better than Fett. She wanted Fett to see her as an equal. 

And to do that, first she had to stop carrying her hurt pride like a deflector shield.

“I really am sorry, you know,” Leia screwed her courage to the sticking place, and made her sincerest eye contact with the eye slit of Fett’s helmet. She’d decided to give her apology to Fett across the galley kitchen of Slave I, so there’d be nowhere else to go and no opportunity to gorg out of it.

“What?”

“I’m …. I’m sorry. I know I’ve been holding a grudge, and it’s getting in the way of you teaching me. So I’m sorry, and I won’t anymore.”

“Oh.” 

“Yeah.”

The silence stretched in the kitchen, fitting more awkwardness between them than should have been physically possible, given the space constraints of the ship’s construction. The twenty year old food preparation system gurgled in the background.

“What brought this on?”

“Huh?”

“What’s made you realize you’re running around causing your own wound?”

“I just want you to see me as an equal. I want you to respect me. That’s never going to happen if you think I’m a child throwing a tantrum every time you tell me something new. So I’m acknowledging that my pride was hurt, and then I’m moving on from there with new eyes.” 

“That’s remarkably mature.” 

“Thanks.……. Biggs told me I was being an idiot. Well, what he actually said was,” and here she mimicked the way Biggs had pretended to be Old Ben the Mad Hermit from the Jundland Wastes,”‘Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.’ But I took that to mean I was being an idiot.” 

“Well then, that’s remarkably mature of Biggs. But you’re doing well, too. I wouldn’t still be here if I didn’t think you had worth.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, you’re doing just fine. I think we’ve got a long way to go together, yet.”

* * *

Of course, the intel given on Sawkee’s puck had been irritatingly sparse. If it had gone to any other pair of bounty hunters in the galaxy, they might have seen the nominal fee issued by the Milvayne Authority and simply bagged and tagged with little fanfare. But, as Leia liked to remind Fett whenever he got too far into his own head about things and needed a boost, they were not just any pair of bounty hunters. For once, being local to Tatooine was an advantage. 

Portside at Mos Eisley, Sawkee was known as Ponda Baba: a low-level thug for Jabba the Hutt who had run out on his contract, sidled up to the Crimson Dawn as security to Dryden Vos’s personal doctor, and then run out on that syndicate as well. In his line of work, it was a dumb idea to frequent the same three cantinas and run up astronomical tabs…but, hey. _Morons make the moons go ‘round_ , as her Aunt Beru says.

The Aqualish has several open bounties on the name Ponda Baba, which Leia supposes led to the use of his current pseudonym: decent credits on offer from several planetary-local authorities, as well as Dead Or Alive contracts from both the Hutts and Crimson Dawn. The opportunity to leverage those syndicates against each other in the name of corporate competition is an added bonus - neither Leia nor Fett hold much love for either criminal empire, even if they do provide most of the open contracts that keep Slave I in fuel and food on the table - but those bounties are not the most pressing reason Leia is currently sitting shoulder to shoulder with general scum.

* * *

The first time Fett had taken her offworld, Leia had nearly cried. Nearly, because of course she didn’t actually cry in front of him, because that was for civilians who didn’t know any better, but still - it was magnificent, to see the spread of Tatooine below her through Slave I’s cockpit, golden and lit around the edges from the sun cresting behind it. From all the way out there, it was impossible to tell that her Aunt and Uncle were days away from owing more than they could ever pay back in water taxes, or that by all odds, some unwary traveler was being murdered in the streets of Anchorhead at this very moment, or that the Hutt Empire even existed. Tatooine was a jewel in the sky before her, and Leia was awestruck.

It was even more incredible when they landed, hours later, on Concord Dawn. There was green and gold as far as the eye could see - fields of plants that Leia could hardly identify except that they probably were food crops, and even more plants growing in ordered patches around the farmhouse they’d landed in front of.

Fett gave Leia a moment to compose herself in the face of more green than she’d ever seen in her life, and said, “Sintas Vel is a friend, and she asked for help. Her husband, Fox - he. He’s a clone. So.”

“A clone? Like, from the Clone Wars a clone? I thought they were all killed by the Jedi.”

“No, that’s just what the Imperial propaganda machine wants people to think. Most of them survived the end of the war to enter service as stormtroopers, and either ate a blaster bolt or were decommissioned after the Emperor solidified his hold on the Mid Rim. The clones……. Fox and I, we share a common ancestor. He thinks that makes us family. I think it makes us strangers with a few similar genetic markers. If it weren’t for Sintas, I wouldn’t be here.”

“Alright.” Leia paused, chewing over her next words. She didn’t want to stay behind, but at the same time, there was more emotion in Fett’s voice just now than she’d heard in three years working together. “Do you want me to stay on the ship? If you really don’t want to be here, you can use me as an out, say you don’t trust me alone with the controls.”

Fett paused, clearly thinking it over. Finally, he turned to Leia and took off his helmet.

“No. You should come. Worst case scenario, you’ll get a preview of what I’ll look like in thirty years, and we choke down some of Fox’s terrible uj’alayi. Best case scenario, you play with Sintas’ daughter Ailyn for a bit and we don’t wind up in over our heads with whatever it is Sintas has got herself caught up in.” 

“If you’re sure….”

“Yeah, I'm sure. It’s just a family reunion. I’m not happy about it, but we came all the way out here. I’m not gonna turn tail now.”

“Alright, then. It’ll be just like when Aunt Dama comes to visit. Best behavior, and lots of nodding politely while smiling and pretending I’m not dying inside every time she talks. We can do this.”

“Sure we can. Sure we can.”

* * *

The most interesting thing about Ponda Baba, the reason Leia had slipped both a sedative and some off-market truth serum into his glass the last time the Aqualish had slumped sideways and pawed at her shoulder, the reason Fett is most likely perched on a rooftop somewhere with his sniper scope engaged and a comm in his ear to catch her transmission at this very moment, is the Aqualish man's partner. 

Leia had made the connection sitting with Fett in the cramped living quarters of Slave I, some time into an interminable flight back to Tatooine. Fett had taken point on their last commission, so he’d been the one to drop off their latest bounty and collect the new job. Technically it was her turn to sleep, but the lure of the unknown was too great for Leia and she wanted to see their next job. Downtime was not a concept with which she was more than passingly familiar.

Fett had lit up the puck, and through the blue glare of the holoprojection, Leia recognized the tusks and beady eyes of a frequent patron at The Weary Traveler. She knew that sentient - and she knew the scum he traveled with. 

* * *

For once, Leia and Fett were undercover on the upper levels of a business conglomerate cloudcutter, a noted change from their usual haunts of cantinas and back alleys and ground-level loading docks. This mark was big money, though - an aide to the third-in-command of the Commerce Guilds, who committed corporate espionage and attempted to sell the information back to the Guilds, plus markup. When the Commerce Guilds refused to pay, the aide then threatened to sell their data to a member of the Corporate Alliance. The client, a Gossam who demanded anonymity, insisted that Leia and Fett apprehend her aide before the end of the evening’s celebration, lest the sale to the Corporate Alliance take place and her share values plummet.

As far as locales to claim bounties went, Leia had to admit that a corporate Life Day event was well worth the price of their forged admission. There were festive plants adorned with glittering baubles, and lights strung from the ceiling of the banquet hall, and more luxury waiter droids distributing Daruvvian champagne than Leia had ever expected to encounter. As she stood in the midst of such excess - a moisture farmer’s niece, a spice freighter navigator’s daughter, a bounty hunter more often in the hole than out of it - the sheer glut of the Empire and its contributors made Leia shake with impotent rage. But this was a job, and so she had to stuff that rage down and enjoy the fete out of spite. One bite in her mouth was one less for the corporate toadies surrounding her tonight, at any rate.

Leia looked over at Fett, for once not wearing his usual armor. It was a formal occasion, after all - and even Fett knew how starkly a Mandalorian in full garb would stand out in this crowd. Without the helmet, though, Fett moved like a different creature: all slink and glide, a Loth-cat on the prowl. He’d dug a pair of leatheris pants and a decent shirt out of storage on Slave 1, though Fett still wore his tattered cape on one shoulder. Leia herself was wearing a white floor-length gown that conveniently hid her boots, scrounged from a second-hand shop and hemmed at the very last minute before the night’s festivities, and if she’d had any other choice at the time she’d be wearing a different color right now. Honestly - who even wore white, to an event with free-range food? It was just asking for trouble of the spilled-drink kind.

“You go left, I’ll go right, and by the time we’ve made a circuit past all the tiny meats on sticks, we can corner him by the coat check.”

“I like the way you think. Save some of the kaadu ribs for me.”

Leia took off, walking at a pace that looked like a casual stroll but covered far more ground - just one more trick Fett had taught her. The key to mingling with a crowd was to pretend you were headed over to talk to someone, and just keep walking until you found yourself behind the target. Her mark stood with a cluster of other Commerce Guild higher-ups, making small talk about their vacation plans for the holiday season, but Leia could tell they were about to make contact with the Corporate Alliance representative. Now, to interrupt that meeting - all she needed was a drink in one hand, and a napkin full of foodstuffs in the other. One conveniently-timed stumble to spill down the mark’s robes should do the trick.

And there was Fett, making eye contact across the room as Leia sipped at her glass of phattro. It was awful - his hair, his focus, the way she wanted to punch him in the face with her mouth - Leia was not prepared for the surge of emotion. She was in the middle of a job - this was no time to have a crush. He was her partner. Nothing could happen. She needed to focus.

And if Leia later thought of the heat in Fett’s eyes, unimpeded by the helmet, as he tackled their target to the ground outside the banquet hall’s coat check and then looked up at Leia as if to say _did you see what I brought you?_ ......well. That was between her and the bag of partially-crushed oi-oi puffs she’d smuggled out of the party under her jacket.

* * *

The personal doctor to the head of Crimson Dawn, Ponda Baba’s partner in crime across dozens of planets called himself Roofoo. He was known to the Milvayne Authority as The Mutilator of Milvayne, and both his mother and the Celanon Merchant Guild Medical Facility knew him as Dr Cornelius Evazan - though his medical license had been revoked for the gross violation of thousands of sentient beings. 

Evazan was an overall abhorrent individual responsible for mutilations on multiple worlds, and his chiefmost depravity was in the creation of the Decraniated - a host of mutilated cyberslaves. With the aid of Baba, Evazan stripped personal autonomy from unwilling subjects, grafted cybernetics to their nervous system in an effort to remove all free will, and turned kidnapped beings into living droids carrying out the whims of their owners. It was the worst kind of molestation, a true perversion of liberty that only ended with death. Leia hoped Evazan burned in the deepest pits of all nine Corellian hells, by the time she caught up with him.

Where Sawkee was a brawler who had the poor judgement to get caught in a bar with a dosed drink by Leia, his partner was more canny - Evazan was currently in the wind. The most pressing bounty was offered by a nobody coalition of moisture farmers and grieving widowers, but all the same - he was the kind of scum Leia would be willing to eliminate for free.

* * *

Fett walked out of the ‘fresher with just a towel wrapped around his waist, a stream of water running from his hair and down his neck, with one last droplet making way across his left pectoral. Leia watched, eyes wide, as steam billowed from the ‘fresher doorway behind him, to frame Fett like the star of a bad holodrama. The scar on his right upper arm, from where she’d had to shoot through him in order to take down a Nikto bouncer in a bar fight, was visible as he turned to face her in the hallway.

“I can’t believe you,” Leia blurted out as the ‘fresher door swooshed shut behind Fett.

“How the hells are you even real? It’s like I hit my head and my concussion gave me all this as punishment for a life poorly lived.”

“What? You lost me.”

“Ughhhh, you!” Leia waved her hands in the air in front of her, as if to better summarize the entire picture Fett presented. “It’s like you’re not even real, so why even bother doing anything about it.”

“You could try doing something about it, whatever it is. You could even try it by using full sentences, before I start dripping on the floor.”

“What am I supposed to say? ‘Oh, banthashit, I like you and you like me but we’re both aware that even though I’m nineteen and legally an adult you’re thirty two years old and my mentor, so maybe we should sleep separate shifts to avoid talking about anything significant like catching feelings for each other’? No! Kriff that! Ugh. I think you’re incredible, and funny when you don’t mean to be, and kind of an asshole, and so kriffing determined that it drives me crazy, and I love you. So no. I’m not going to sit quietly and wait for my feelings to die. Now you say something.”

“I think you said just about everything, there.”

“So? What are you going to do about it?”

“I think…. I’m going to put on some pants, and let you have the ‘fresher, and when you’re done I’ll grab the puck for our next job so we can plan. And then after that’s done, I think I’ll tell the navicomputer to turn on the autopilot, and see if we can’t manage to accommodate the both of us in my rack for a nap together.”

“You… really. You’re not going to make me ‘rethink my options’, or some other poodoo like that?”

“No, Leia. I trust you to know your own mind. And you obviously know mine. So, we’ll take it slow, feel it out together.”

“Well, alright then. In that case, I have a date with a ‘fresher to get to, so we can get on with the rest of your plan.”

* * *

Which all leads up Leia as she sits at the bar, resisting the urge to reach for the blade in her boot and put a hole through the sleemo leaning heavily against her side, as he warbles about the glories of his time on Milvayne and the atrocities Evazan had perpetrated. She hopes Fett’s getting what he needs from her transmission of the conversation - between her lack of fluency in Aqualish and Sawkee’s- Baba’s- this noski’s drunken slurring, Leia’s only catching one word in ten. The sooner he tells her where Evazan is now, the sooner she can wrap this up. Leia’s got plans for the rest of the evening, and they include playing criminal syndicates against each other for maximum profit, and maybe even catching a nap cuddled up with Fett as the degenerate next to her weeps in the hold of Slave I.

"Where are you going to go now, if Black Sun is chasing you? Don’t you want to find your friend?” Leia prompts.

Baba's response is made all the more unintelligible as he slumps against the bar top, but Leia thinks it sounds like he says, “Jedha.”

Then there's a double buzz from from Leia's comlink - her signal from Fett that he's translated the location of Evazan from the bleats and growls. And that's her cue: the transition from doe-eyed barfly to no-nonsense hunter is easy for Leia, and Baba next to her hardly even notices. Leia pushes back her stool, stands, and in one move slams the Aqualish's forehead against the counter to knock him unconscious. She slaps a pair of binders on his arms, a second set around his ankles as the mark slumps off his own stool, and drags him across the floor by the wrists through the same doors the idiot had sauntered through earlier.

Not a single patron bats an eye, and the bartending droid recites a preprogrammed "Come again soon!" as the doors swoosh closed behind Leia.

As Leia waits out front of the cantina, she can see the growing dust cloud of Fett's speeder coming up the road. She's got a bounty in-hand, a solid lead on a target worthy of elimination even if he didn't come with a hefty reward, and the rest of the day free to enjoy. All in all, it’s been a successful afternoon.

Then Fett pulls into view, and swerves to a stop just ahead of where Leia is standing in an unnecessarily showy maneuver. Well, what else can she expect from a man who voluntarily flies a jetpack instead of walking to the store - drama, and more drama, all the frelling time. Not one to be outdone, Leia saunters as she pulls her prize along.

A few steps away from the speeder, Leia jibes, “Look at this - you’ve got me doing it too, now.”

“Doing what?”

“I’m dragging home a present for you, a bounty I bagged myself. I’m showing off how good a provider I am. At this rate, all I need to do is knead your thigh later while we nap in a sunbeam, and I’ll be a regular tooka.”

“Hah, you know…. you’re not wrong about that. You certainly leave enough hairballs in the ‘fresher.”

Leia walks forward and smacks him in the shoulder for that, but of course Fett’s armor means she injures herself more than him. At least he gets the point, though.

Fett shrugs as he climbs out of the speeder, and Leia can hear a smile in his voice through the helmet’s enunciator.

“Throw in some Keldabe kisses, and you get the head bunting thing they do, too.”

“Oh, are we moving on to kisses now? Because I want real kissing, not the headbutting in helmets thing you Mandalorians do. I want tongue.”

“I’ll see what I can manage.”

With that, Fett turns to lift Baba into the back of his landspeeder, engaging the maglocks so that Baba can’t sit up and wrest control of the vehicle if he wakes up earlier than anticipated. Then he walks up to Leia, and puts an gauntleted hand on her shoulder.

“Where to next?”

“Well, I was thinking we’d collect the payout for our friend in the back there, and then head to Jedha. A little birdie told me we might find our friend’s missing friend there. We wouldn’t want to stand in the way of their reunion, now would we.”

“No, we really wouldn’t. I like the way you think, Leia.”

[the end]

**Author's Note:**

> “Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.” - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
> 
> Timelines, what time lines? This is a terrifying mishmash of Legends canon and just plain stuff I feel like. If Dave Filoni can do it, I can too.
> 
> Does this imply that somehow, Leia and Fett will wind up on Jedha looking for Evazan just in time for the Empire to try out Death Ray Mark One? Maybe. Does this imply that somehow, Leia and Fett are going to hook up with Jyn and Cassian and the Rebellion? Maybe. Does this imply that the Slave I will be a backup ship not expected in the skies above Scariff, and possibly intercept the Death Star plans transmission, and wind up going back to Tatooine to rescue Prince Luke and Hermit Ben when they need a lift off-planet in a hurry? MAYBE. Does this also mean that at one point, Leia slapped Han Solo in a barfight at Jabba’s palace? Absolutely.


End file.
